Tuesday, August 21, 2007

The problem with Hollywood these days isn't that every producer makes a pitch that references at least two other movies (e.g., "It's like The Flintstones meets Jurassic Park but..are you ready for this?...we throw in a touch of Mad Max by setting it in the post-apocalyptic future!") but that they don't rely heavily enough on the movies they reference. If they've already sold the idea, why re-create the proverbial wheel? Why not just take a couple of movies and combine their scripts to create something new? That, my friends, sounds to me like a recipe for success. In fact, I've only been thinking about this for about ten minutes or so and I've already come up with two sure-fire blockbusters.

Synopsis: In 1949 composer Roman Strauss is executed for the vicious murder of his wife Margaret with a pair of scissors. In modern day Los Angeles a mute amnesiac woman shows up at an orphanage and an amnesiac man who was found adrift in the sea - and who is attempting to discover his own identity - is called in to investigate. The investigation is complicated by the fact that the man, who is proficient in multiple languages, espionage, and martial arts, is being pursued by his former employers at the CIA. Under hypnosis it is revealed that both the man and the woman seem to have a strange and mysterious link back to the Strauss murder.

Synopsis: A romantic comedy/thriller in which young playwright who is struggling with his latest work "Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter" decides to take a vacation to help relieve his writer’s block. During the flight, he meets his muse in the form of a flight attendant named Viola. Their budding love story is cut short when they join forces with an FBI agent to defend the passengers from deadly and poisonous snakes that have been deliberately released in an attempt to kill a witness who is being flown from Elizabethan London to modern-day Los Angeles so that he can testify against a mob boss.

See? It's easy. Feel free to share your ideas in the comments section. I promise to include them in my next pitch and to make you to know as it appears.